Mourning America: Quantico and the Drift Toward Military Rule
How Trump and Hegsethâs Quantico speeches blurred the line between politics and war, recasting dissent as insurgency and democracy as a battlefield
James B. Greenberg
Oct 03, 2025
I am in mourning for America. The grief feels heavy, like losing someone I loved. The country I grew up with â flawed yet still striving â feels almost alien now. The values that shaped me, liberty, equality, the freedom to dissent, no longer seem to have a place.
The reason for that grief was on display at Quantico, where Trump and Hegseth outlined what looked less like a campaign and more like a new order. They never used the word dictatorship, yet the intent was unmistakable. The âenemy within,â they warned, would now fall to the armed forces to confront. Opposition was no longer disagreement among citizens; it was insurgency.
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In anthropology, words do not simply describe reality â they remake it. To call opponents âenemies withinâ is to push them out of the category of rival and into the category of threat. Once that shift takes hold, repression no longer appears a violation but a duty.
This is why the rhetoric matters. Trumpâs call to repurpose cities as training grounds, Hegsethâs vow to instill âwarrior culture,â the proposal to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War â none of these are stray lines. They are signals that the military is being reshaped from external defense toward domestic enforcement. This is not drift but a deliberate reshaping of the militaryâs purpose.
The ambiguity is calculated. They never said, âWe are declaring a dictatorship.â Instead, they spoke in terms elastic enough to give cover. Defenders can dismiss it as metaphor. But for those in the room â military officers being told their real battle lies at home â the meaning was unmistakable.
History shows where this path leads. When Roman generals crossed the Rubicon, they redefined loyalty to the republic as loyalty to a man. In 20th-century Latin America, juntas seized power in the name of defending against âinternal enemies.â Pinochet in Chile and Franco in Spain both used the rhetoric of national salvation to justify the silencing of opposition. And even here at home, the Red Scare and COINTELPRO blurred dissent and danger, branding citizens as subversives for the ideas they held. Each case began not with a decree, but with speeches and signals that invited the military and security services to turn inward. Democracies survive only when a clear boundary separates civilian politics from the armed forces; once that wall is breached, the garrison overtakes the government.
From an anthropological lens, the Quantico speeches worked as ritual. They staged a performance that bound insiders together through repetition of threat and loyalty. Civic space was turned into a symbolic battlefield; dissent cast as heresy. The words did cultural work: producing a shared understanding that domestic opposition is no longer subjects for debate, but targets to be subdued.
The danger is not abstract. Once opponents are named enemies, the shift cascades. Police departments remake themselves in the image of an army. Protesters are policed as insurgents. Communities already marked as suspect â immigrants, students, organizers â become targets of surveillance and force. Everyday civic life contracts until obedience feels like the only form of safety.
Was this a declaration of military dictatorship? Legally, nothing was signed into law. Culturally and politically, the declaration had already been made. It was a declaration without the name â a soft launch of a governing order where citizens are sorted into loyalists and enemies, where institutions are bent toward war footing, and where the armed forces are invited to cross the line from defending the republic to enforcing the executive.
Democracy doesnât turn into dictatorship overnight; it seeps in through the steady drip of speeches, symbols, and directives that recast rivals as threats until repression feels inevitable. Quantico was one of those moments. And it is why I mourn: because the vocabulary of war is being welded onto everyday politics, and the country I loved drifts further from itself.
I grieve because the America I knew is slipping away â a flawed republic, yes, but one that still aspired to liberty, equality, and dissent. What remains is something harder, colder, and less familiar: a nation teaching its citizens to see neighbors as enemies, and its soldiers to turn inward. That is the loss I feel most deeply: not only of a country, but of the promise it once carried.
Suggested Readings
Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday, 2020.
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton, 2020.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Neumann, Franz. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933â1944.New York: Oxford University Press, 1942.
Pion-Berlin, David. Military Missions in Democratic Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.
